For lack of oxygen, the water is not capable to receive aquatic life. According to jobs published by a duet of Swedish researchers and American (1), a portion always bigger of littoraux of the planet would well need one oxygen mask. They identified not less than four hundred regions which it is possible to qualify as "dead", covering more than 245 000 square kilometres of ocean. The main culprit? The intensive agriculture which pours out tons of fertilising and other nitrogenous nutriments which dope the growth of seaweeds, impoverishing the water in oxygen.

In proportion to the concerned surfaces, naturally, he makes good food for fauna and flora on the most part of the oceans. But dead-bands, which the double number every ten years, are precious at the same time for aquatic life and for men. Because these coastal regions produce important quantities of such important animal proteins to feed a humanity always more many. It is as there that reproduce a good many of kinds of the open sea.

The card raised by Robert Diaz and Rutger Rosenberg raises a particularly black picture of the State of coasts the Baltic Sea, but also in Brittany is the United States, in the Gulf of Mexico as well as on the perimetre of the mainland Europe, notably in the Adriatic and. In some regions, the hypoxie, the lack of oxygen, is only short-term, in some epochs of the year. But elsewhere, as in the mouth of Mississipi, phenomenon is recurrent. Worse, all that dies in a zone deprived of oxygen brings a surplus of nutriments which will tend to feed following episode. An effect snowball which explains the important increase in phenomena of determined eutrophisation.

(1) Science of August 15th, 2008

Picture: © Denis Delbecq